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6/22/2007 Microsoft Office RoundTable Review

Microsoft Office RoundTable is a very cool videoconferencing system featuring 360° panoramic views powered by its 5 built-in cameras. Microsoft sent me a RoundTable system for review. I figured I may as well install it in one of TMC"s two conference rooms to have some "real world" testing scenarios. After plugging in the various cables, including a USB cable to the host PC, I then installed the Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 (LM 2007) beta software client, which was designed to handle the RoundTable"s 360° panoramic cameras. I should point out that Microsoft is offering both a hosted model for Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 as well as a CPE (customer premise equipment) solution, namely Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS 2007). The RoundTable can work with either. However, I tested it with a Microsoft Office Live Meeting online beta account.

The RoundTable actually installs two USB camera devices. The first is the Active Speaker which uses the RoundTable"s 6 microphones to locate where in the room the active speaker is and then focus one of the 5 cameras onto that person. I suspect it may actually use 2 cameras to focus on a person, since it always appears that the speaker is "centered" which probably would require at least 2 camera images and then the images are "spliced" together, processed, and then transmitted over the USB cable. The second USB camera device is the panoramic camera which combines the 5 camera images into a single panoramic image.

Next, I initiated a Live Meeting session in the conference room and went back to my desk to join the meeting. Unbeknownst to me, by the time I got to my desk, some TMC sales team members walked into the conference room to start a meeting. When I launched my LM 2007 client I saw Anthony Graffeo, one of TMC"s sales staff staring right into one of the 5 triangular mirrors located just above the cameras. I headed over the conference room to tell them I could see and hear everything that was going on. After giving a brief demo, Anthony said, "that frickin thing is awesome!". I heard similar comments from other TMCers over the next few days - including "That thing is cool" and "Wow! What is that?"

During my tests with Office Live Meeting 2007, I was able to see the entire conference room in the panoramic view. The other video view is the "active speaker" and it would change to whoever was speaking. It was actually quite accurate and surprisingly fast. When I tested it with Rich Tehrani, Joe Fabiano, Mike Genaro, and Dave Rodriguez, we all took turns speaking and the camera view would almost instantly switch.

Overall, the video quality was excellent, Very smooth. Later on I did some more tests with just me in the conference room. I tried to trick the cameras by snapping my fingers above the microphone and the video wouldn"t switch. I figured it must be using a combination of audio and video cues to determine the active speaker. A quick glance in the manual reveals, "To avoid switching to a non-human sound source, the video functions to assist in determining whether the sound detected is coming from an attendee or some other source." Answers that question!

Below is a Flash demo demonstrating the active speaker functionality. When I ran this test, I did it by myself and just walked around the conference room while continuing to speak. I will make a 2nd video with several fellow TMCers if I can get some volunteers. This would better demonstrate the active speaker feature. Also, the video I did record appears much jerkier than it actually was live. Part of that is because it was my first time using Camtasia Studio to capture the screen & audio, so I only had it set to 15fps (not 30fps). Secondly, the PC I was recording on isn"t the greatest, so I"m sure Camtasia skipped a few video frames since it the processor was taxed. Nevertheless, this video gives you a good feel for the active speaker functionality. If you want a larger-resolution version, click here.

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The base has an LCD touch-screen that serves as a dialpad and to configure various options. An external dialpad is available as well, but I didn"t get one with my unit, so not sure if that"s an extra option. The LCD touch-screen dialpad seems good enough to me. Physical buttons also exist to increase/decrease speaker volume, a mute audio / halt video button, Flash button, on/off hook, and an Information button. There is also a privacy cap that goes on top of the unit to block the cameras and prevent anyone from viewing the conference room.

Although the Microsoft RoundTable was designed for Office Live Meeting 2007 & OCS 2007, since it is simply 2 separate USB camera devices in the Device Manager, I figured it would most likely work with other videoconferencing, audioconferencing, or VoIP software. So I fired up Skype on the conference room PC and went into the video wizard. I tried the panoramic device first, but all that was displayed was a black screen. Then I changed it to the active speaker USB camera device and it worked. I made a test Skype call to the Microsoft Roundtable, again with some fellow TMC"ers and the active speaker functionality worked just as well in Skype. Obviously, it"s the RoundTable hardware performing the video switching and not LM 2007. Also, I was able to use Skype"s "full screen" video mode and it had extremely high-resolution video with very fast frame rates. Here"s a screenshot of Skype in action viewing the RoundTable video:

Microsoft designed RoundTable to equalize the varying light levels when one part of the conference room is darker than another. In fact, TMC"s conference room has sunlight coming in the window and I noticed the RoundTable was able to do a pretty good job equalizing the light across the entire room.

The Microsoft RoundTable features both an RJ11 (phone) and an RJ45 (network) jack. The RJ11 wire lets you connect to a PSTN line and use the RoundTable as a high-end conference room speakerphone. The RoundTable lets you place outgoing calls, answer an incoming call, conduct a video conference with audio from the microphones or a video-only session with no audio from the microphones. In the video-only mode you can use the PSTN line or even your cell phone for the audio portion.

I like the aesthetic design of the Microsoft RoundTable. It is one cool looking device. Reminds me of the alien spaceships in H.G. Wells" War of the Worlds movie (the original 1953 movie, not the Tom Cruise remake). Compare for yourself! Both have "eyes" and both have a long neck connected to the main base.

Interestingly, the RoundTable doesn"t aim its 5 cameras directly at you. As previously mentioned, it uses triangular mirrors. I"m not sure if this was done because people are more relaxed and natural if they don"t think a camera is staring right back at them or if it was simply for aesthetic design that Microsoft chose to use mirrors. I did some research on the history of the RoundTable and discovered it was previously called the Ringcam. During Microsoft"s research, they had some interesting "beta" versions before the final RoundTable, including these two below. Note how both models point cameras directly outward. I definitely prefer the less obtrusive "mirror" version in the production model. I tried to take apart the RoundTable to see the inner guts of the camera head, but the damn thing is glued on or something since I couldn"t find any screws.

Even more interesting in a Microsoft Research PDF article it talks about head-size spatial equalization. That is, making sure everyone"s head is equally big in the videoconference even if a person is further from the camera. The article has several diagrams and complex trigonometry formulas (sin & cos functions) that bring back high school. The article states the following:

In the past a few years, there has been a lot of interest in the use of omni-directional cameras for video conferencing and meeting recording. While a panoramic view is capable of capturing every participant’s face, one drawback is that the image sizes of the people around the meeting table are not uniform in size due to the varying distances to the camera. Figure 1 shows a 360 degree panorama image of a meeting room. The table size is 10x5 feet. The person in the middle of the image appears very small compared to the other two people because he is further away from the camera.

This has two consequences. First, it is difficult for the remote participants to see some faces, thus negatively affecting the video conferencing experience. Second, it is a waste of the screen space and network bandwidth because a lot of the pixels are used on the background instead of on the meeting participants. As image sensor technology rapidly advances, it is possible to design inexpensive high-resolution (more than 2000 horizontal pixels) omni-directional video cameras [1]. But due to network bandwidth and user’s screen space, only a smaller-sized image can be sent to the clients. Therefore how to effectively use the pixels has become a critical problem in improving the video conferencing experience.

Spatially-varying-uniform (SVU) scaling functions have been proposed [2] to address this problem. A SVU scaling function warps a panorama image to equalize people’s head sizes without creating discontinuities. Fig. 2 shows the result after head-size equalization.

Note how the guy in the white shirt is larger after head-size equalization. Unfortunately, it doesn"t appear that the RoundTable I"m testing incorporates the head-size equalization, since none of the heads in the conference room appeared to be equalized. Guess my head (& ego) will have to continue to be the biggest. smile

I read up on this some more and according to this Microsoft article, RoundTable "uses visual cues to pinpoint, enlarge and emphasize the face of the speaker". So it sounds like it does have this feature. I"ll have to test this further.

Conclusion
All in all, I was pretty impressed with the Microsoft RoundTable. With its panoramic view and active speaker video switching functionality, you almost feel as though you are there in the conference room. I do wish the panoramic USB camera device worked in other applications besides LM 2007 and OCS 2007, but at least the active speaker video works. Although not released for general availability, the Microsoft RoundTable is expected to retail for around $3,000 putting this in the category of high-end videoconferencing systems. However, with fuel costs and other travel expenses, a high-quality, high-end videoconferencing system can pay for itself very quickly.

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Tags: Microsoft Office RoundTable, RoundTable, Skype, videoconferencing, VoIP
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6/21/2007 U.S. SMBs spending $30B on converged communications and managed services in 2007

According to a study by AMI-Partners, small and medium businesses in the United States have been slow to adopt converged/unified communications. They claim that this trend will change this year and estimate the total SMB U.S. IP communications and managed services opportunity to be over $30 billion in 2007 and growing at a CAGR of 15.6 percent through 2010.

"SMBs are migrating toward converged communications solutions over a single IP network for voice, data, video to support ubiquitous communications, and outsourcing processes which their internal IT staff are unable to manage, says Sanjeev Aggarwal, AMI’s New York-based Vice President for SMB Infrastructure Solutions.

Two interesting stats:

US SMB IP-PBX shipments now exceed traditional TDM-PBX (including key systems) systems.

IP-PBX penetration among US MBs rose from 20% in 2005 to 25% in 2006.

Check out the full article.

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Tags: AMI-Partners, converged communications, IP-PBX, managed services, unified communications, VoIP
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6/20/2007 Covad T1 Speed and Latency Test Plus Overview

As part of the Covad Blogger"s program, Andy setup several industry bloggers with a Covad T1. Greg, Phoneboy, and Ken Camp, have all covered their experiences with using a Covad Internet T1 connection. On a related note, Rich Tehrani had an interview with Covad"s Jeff Ahlquist, Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy that is definitely worth checking out.

Anyyway, last week, I had my T1 installed and configured. One of the first things I did was perform a bandwidth speed test. I went to http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ and ran an online bandwidth test. First the download test ran and I got 1,450Kbps, which is pretty close to a standard-rated 1.544Mbps (1544Kbps) T1 connection. Then the upload (upstream) test ran and to my shock I was only getting 444Kbps. This isn"t nearly as fast as it should be. I tried another speed test website and got similar results.

I fired off an email to Andy explaining my benchmark results and asked him if I received a "true" T1. He responded that it was a true T1 and that there was no way my upstream should be that slow. He suggested I contact Covad technical support, but before I did that, I decide to play around with my Linksys WRT54G router.

Just by chance I happened to click the Applications & Gaming menu in the Linksys Web-based admin and noticed a QoS tab. I clicked on the QoS tab and noticed I had QoS turned on and configured to give my now defunct Cisco ATA-186 "high priority". I set my ATA-186 to "high priority" over a year ago when I was having VoIP quality issues with Vonage. I forgot I had QoS turned on, but surely having QoS enabled wouldn"t affect my upstream bandwidth, would it? The Linksys router should be smart enough to see that there is no Vonage device with the MAC address specified currently receiving/transmitting packets, and therefore the router should give all the bandwidth to any application that wants it. Seems logical, right?

Wrong! I turned off QoS and then ran another bandwidth test and voila, I had symmetric speeds of about 1,450Kbps. Actually, the upstream was slightly faster than the downstream on my first test with 1,468Kbps vs. 1,450Kbps. I joked with Andy, "Well, it is a cheap residential WRT54G router, so I guess I can’t expect commercial-grade QoS with ToS bits, etc." Here"s a screenshot of the Linksys QoS setup screen showing how I had the Vonage ATA device set to high priority. (click for Larger Image)

Moral of the story - If you want maximum performance leave QoS turned off if using a Linksys router. Seems counter-intuitive doesn"t it?

However, if I still had Vonage and used a bandwidth hog such as P2P client (eMule, Bittorent, etc.) I would need to leave QoS turned on so the voice packets get priority. It would appear as a side effect I would lose roughly 1,000Kbps of upstream bandwidth, which really sucks. Maybe Linksys has new firmware for the WRT54G, which resolves this issue. I"m running v3.03.6 currently.

In any case, I did one other test to check the latency of the Covad T1, which is actually more important than raw bandwidth if you"re doing VoIP or videoconferencing. As a benchmark test, I pinged Yahoo.com and TMC"s T3 router. Here are the results of an approximately 10min ping test:

TMC T3 Router
Packets: Sent = 1075, Received = 1075, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 10ms, Maximum = 921ms, Average = 100ms

Yahoo!
Ping statistics for 216.109.112.135:
Packets: Sent = 1017, Received = 1016, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 13ms, Maximum = 37ms, Average = 18ms

Pretty impressive latency numbers, especially when pinging Yahoo.com since it"s maximum latency was 37ms and it"s average was an amazing 18ms. It would appear that Covad sits very close to where Yahoo! connects to the Internet. Obviously, since Covad is a carrier they sit near the main fat pipes. Yahoo gets massive traffic, so I"m sure they connect just a few short hops from the fat pipes. I"m sure both have multiple connections across the country and of course Covad has Tier-1 peering agreements, which guarantees that cross-country traffic is super fast.

Overall, I"m very happy with my Covad T1 experience. The installer was friendly and courteous. The latency is excellent and the bandwidth, in particular the upstream is much better than my DSL. I asked the Covad installer about Covad offering fiber in the near future, since Verizon is quickly deploying their FiOS service and AT&T is going gangbusters with their U-verse service. Both of these competitors can provide Triple Play packages (voice, video, data).

He mentioned he was aware of Verizon FiOS and that Covad currently doesn"t offer a fiber solution, but hinted that FiOS was helping to push Covad to provide fiber in the very near future. I think AT&T and Verizon are starting to drive some of the Tier-2 carriers to provide fiber to the home (FTTH) or provide a hybrid-fiber/copper approach like AT&T"s U-verse is taking. And that my friends is great news for residential customers which are clamoring for more bandwidth and more services at an inexpensive price point.

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Tags: bandwidth, Covad, latency, Linksys, QoS, speed test, T1, Vonage, WRT54G
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6/19/2007 fring coming to Windows Mobile phones

Some big news from fring, a popular free mobile VoIP software. fring will soon announce support for Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6.0 devices. Currently, Fring only works on Nokia phones which use the Symbian operating system. What, no iPhone support?

Fring is actually pretty cool. It"s a thin client that allows you to talk & IM via your handset"s Internet connection to other mobile phones and PC-based services such as Skype, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, SIP and Twitter for free. It also unifies all of your various contacts across all of these IM/VoIP networks so you can use a single app to view presence and initiate chat sessions or voice calls. Alas, no video yet. Though I haven"t seen a good mobile videoconferencing app yet, so can"t fault fring for that one. Video is actually pretty processor intensive and most mobile phones just don"t have the horsepower.

In any event, fring can be downloaded into your handset via SMS received from another fringster or from their download page.

Right now you can only get the Nokia version, but the Windows Mobile version is coming (soon). Stay tuned!

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Tags: fring, Google Talk, IM, mobile phone, MSN Messenger, Nokia, presence, Skype, VoIP, Windows Mobile
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6/19/2007 Staying up on the Latest Green Technologies

Genesis: And God said, Let there be light and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.

And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

And man did indeed be fruitful and multiply and gained dominion over all the Earth. Man gained in knowledge over the centuries. With increased knowledge came the Industrial Revolution, and new advanced technologies -- and with this unfortunately came an increasing appetite for more materials and more energy.

Whether you believe God created the Earth or it was simply "random luck" in the vast cosmos, Earth"s environment has provided Man will all his needs. Trees, a renewable source have provided Man with wood, heat, shelter, paper, and hundreds of drugs including aspirin and ibuprofen. Crops provide Man nourishment. Steel and other metals are used in millions of products. Oil drives the economies of most of the world"s nations.

But Man has abused his environment with pollution, over fertilization, over fishing, carbon-emitting vehicles, and wasteful garbage that should be recycled. Many claim Global Warming is a result of Man"s activities on this planet. Many others aren"t convinced of Global Warming or at least that Man is at fault for it. But while the Global Warming debate continues, we all want to be as eco-friendly to the environment as possible. After all, we all need clean air, water, and food, to live, right?

In fact, many corporations are now seeing the financial benefits of investing in "green" technologies that not only add to their corporate profits, but also helps protect the planet. Green technologies such as wind power, hybrid vehicles and more efficient solar cells for generating power are just a few.

If you"re environmentally-conscious and are interested in staying up on the latest "green" technologies and breakthroughs, then you should add TMC"s new Green Blog to your RSS reader. It just started, but it already has over 10 posts and is growing daily. Go check it out!

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Tags: environment, Global Warming, God, Green blog
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6/19/2007 T-Mobile blocks VoIP - again!

What"s up with T-Mobile UK? First T-Mobile banned instant messaging and VoIP, as I wrote about last year. And now T-Mobile UK is at it again blocking Truphone, a mobile VoIP operator. Apparently, T-Mobile is blocking calls in a dispute over interconnection fees. When they attempt to dial, T-Mobile customers get a recorded message saying they must have misdialed.

The reason that T-Mobile claims it is not connecting the calls is that the termination rate Truphone wants to charge T-mobile is roughly the same that it pays the other mobile network operators, while Truphone has no mobile network to support and maintain.

"Other operators have invested huge amounts of money into their networks," T-Mobile corporate communications head Simon Marks said. "Truphone has no network to maintain."

UK telecom regulator Ofcom requires phone companies to interconnect, strengthening Truphone claim that T-Mobile is in breach of Ofcom rules by refusing to accept its rates. However, its rates are only reasonable if Truphone is classified as a mobile operator. According to Techworld, Ofcom"s rules state that operators are allowed to charge for interconnection to their numbers, and says these fees should be "fair and reasonable" and "transparent". However, Ofcom only states they apply to mobile networks, leaving a possibility for mobile operators to discriminate against those they regard as not being "real" mobile operators.

Thus, it seems likely Ofcom will be have to rule on the whether Truphone is classified as a mobile operator.

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Tags: blocking, mobile operator, T-Mobile, Truphone, VoIP
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6/19/2007 Red Hat Targets Carrier-Grade Telecom

Red Hat, makers of the popular Red Hat Linux distribution, is expanding their footprint in telecommunications with the acquisition of Mobicents technology and its new membership to the SCOPE alliance, an alliance dedicated towards building carrier-grade platforms. Red Hat will work to provide the infrastructure software, platforms and tools to enable a next-generation service creation environment, and advanced delivery and management within the telecommunications industry.

“As the telecommunications industry undergoes fundamental transformation, traditional Telcos must prepare for a new competitive environment that demands greater innovation, faster time to market, responsible investment and new ways of thinking,” said Joanne Rohde, Executive Vice President of Verticals Marketing at Red Hat.

“Open Source is becoming strategic in Telecom, not only as a means to reduce costs, but as a model to inspire collaboration, inclusion and reuse – and to drive innovation. Today, Red Hat software is routinely deployed in mission-critical Telco IT and Network environments around the world. Through our investment in Mobicents, our alignment with the SCOPE Alliance and strong commitment to standards, we look forward to establishing Red Hat and open source software as fundamental building blocks for the successful Telcom companies of the future.”

Mobicents adds a Service Logic Execution Environment (SLEE) to Red Hat"s technology portfolio. It complements J2EE to enable convergence of voice, video and data in next-generation intelligent applications. In the telecommunications industry with call setup transactions as many as ten times the number of web data transactions per second, Mobicents enables high throughput with low latency.

Mobicents is a highly scalable event-driven application server with a robust component model and fault tolerant execution environment that is effective beyond the telecommunications industry. It is the first and only Open Source Platform certified for JSLEE 1.0 compliance. Web and SIP can be combined together to achieve a more sophisticated and natural user experience. In fact, Mobicents claims to be the most popular Open Source SIP Application Server for the Java platform.

Mobicents also provides a network abstraction layer that insulates developers from the underlying complexities of legacy telecommunications network protocols and enables rapid development of new services and seamless deployment across IP and legacy Telco networks.

Red Hat intends to develop a communications platform offering that integrates Mobicents with the broader Red Hat middleware offerings. More information about subscription product offerings will be available later this year. In the interim, Red Hat will offer a pilot/beta program and a “bridge support” offering for development and deployment of production applications and solutions that incorporate Mobicents technology.

"JSLEE is an important emerging industry standard for even-driven architecture that is gaining its early traction in telecommunications industry," said Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner. " An open source offering in this space extends the available options for users looking into event-driven computing and architecture."

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Tags: data, Java, JSLEE, Linux, Mobicents, open source, Red Hat, SIP, video, VoIP
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6/18/2007 Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV

Microsoft today announced that they have renamed Microsoft IPTV to Microsoft Mediaroom to more accurately reflect the comprehensive "media" functionality of their IPTV platform. In conjunction with the name change to Mediaroom, Microsoft announced several new features to its Internet Protocol television (IPTV) software platform, including in-home personal music and photo sharing and dynamic MultiView (multiple picture-in-picture) capabilities that will allow you to have up to 16 Picture-in-Picture (PIP) windows in a single screen.
Microsoft Mediaroom

Though unless you are Data, the android from Star Trek TNG, there is no way anyone can process that much video input!

Also, their API will allow multiple camera angles, which could be a huge boom for sports channels. Imagine for instance if you can subscribe to an NFL Plus Channel that allows you to see multiple camera angles within PIP windows. You"ll be able to see live whether a player"s feet was inbound or out of bounds without a replay.

The new Multimedia Application Environment provides an HTML-based development environment, with open-application-programming interfaces that will allow third parties to develop applications for Mediaroom, including video-on-demand portals, gaming, and interactive TV services. The Microsoft Mediaroom multimedia platform supports simultaneous recording of multiple high-definition and standard-definition TV channels. Sweet!

Ironically, AT&T U-Verse, a Microsoft partner that uses Microsoft-powered set-top boxes can only watch/record 1 HDTV channel at a time. Perhaps U-Verse customers and their Microsoft set-top boxes will get an upgrade in the near future to the new Mediaroom, which supports >1 HDTV channel? Although I believe it"s not a set-top box issue with a single HDTV limitation, but rather it"s a bandwidth limitation of AT&T U-Verse which utilizes a fiber/copper-hybrid approach. It"s copper the last leg into the house (VDSL), so squeezing multiple HDTV channels plus have room for Internet surfing bandwidth is a technical obstacle rather than a software one.

No doubt Microsoft has made Mediaroom "transport agnostic" so it can work over coax, copper, or fiber. So the more bandwidth you have, the more advantage you can take of their multiple HDTV capabilities.

One of the important new features in Mediaroom is the personal media sharing. This enables consumers to listen to digital music and view digital photographs stored on PCs on their televisions. Currently, 10 service providers worldwide are commercially deploying the Microsoft IPTV platform for their digital-TV offerings, including AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telekom, T-Online, and Switzerland’s Swisscom.

Thus, unfortunately, you have to be in one of the select areas where this IPTV offering is being deployed. U-Verse is coming to Connecticut and it"s being deployed very rapidly. Unfortunately, my neighborhood doesn"t have it yet and I"m none too bitter about it too.

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